Painting Quotes - Page 23

The Painter's Keys is a timeless, universal guide to lifemanship masquerading as a painting blog.

Not everything in life can or should be explained. Part of every painting should be incomplete...to be completed in the mind of the viewer.

I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image.

You have to live in a state of thinking your painting is good, or you couldn't do it.

I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway

Basically painting is total idiocy.

I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.

Nature engenders the science of painting

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

I'm not interested in painting; I'm not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process.

There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.

Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.

My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.